Title: Ourselves / 1981
Artist: Yosuke Yajima
Designer: Goshi Uhira, Clara Huber
Editor:Yosuke Yajima and Sawako Fukai
Printer: Sun M Color Ltd. Kyoto, Japan
Publication date and place: August, 2015, Tokyo, Japan
Edition: 500
Format, binding: Hardcover, German Binding
Size: 212×290mm
Number of pages and images: 56 pages, 31 images
Type of printing and paper: offset / Milt GA Spirit（Snow White, 110kg）
Retail price: 3,400 JPY
Book Description: Yosuke Yajima was born in Yamanashi, which is a suburban area near Tokyo, in 1981. He started taking photograph while he was a student. Since he was selected one of the winners of the“1_WALL”award in 2009, he has been selected for many solo and group exhibitions and photography festivals inside and outside Japan. The photo book “Ourselves / 1981”compiles his works between 2010 and 2015, that covers literally this young artist’s entire career. As the title shows, this is a documentation of an era and feelings which Yajima himself has experienced. Knowing the nature of photography, which captures the time and air surrounding the subject matter, Yajima takes a careful and positive approach to capturing a scene, which includes not only the subjects but also the air around it. Anyone born in the Kanto area (a suburban area around Tokyo) in the 80s has been through many moments of the dynamic change of the megalopolis as it moves into the next century, and felt the transition of the physical texture of the world. In this highly developed society all lives, relationships and, feelings have become suburban-ized., They hold no particularly optimistic or pessimistic visions, or realistic feelings towards the future, which they can already easily imagine as the result of an endless sense of the world as pleasant but lukewarm. Yajima has observed and visualized this specific absence of temperature and feeling of disquiet through the medium of photography. He has been paying careful attention on a slight feeling of deviation he constantly bears, while adjust his perfectly normal life as a decent adult to confirm with society’s invisible pressures. Only photography makes its possible for him to create images, which explain his feelings, by choosing the right location, models, subjects, and lightings. Prefab walls, inorganic landscape with modern buildings that look like huge plastic models, portraits without faces. All those images without any temperature or textures paradoxically reveal Yajima’s an eager thirst and questioning attitudes towards life. – Sawako Fukai（G/P Gallery,Tokyo, Director)
Book Soundtrack:
- Title: Ourselves / 1981